INTRODUCTION What Is Folklore?

INTRODUCTION After all that can be obtained from other realms of knowledge, it is seen that there is a large gap left still – a gap in the heart of things, a gap waiting to be filled by all that can be learned about the thought, ideas, beliefs, conceptions, and aspirations of the people which have been translated for them, but not by them, into the laws, institutions, and religion which find their way so easily into history.1 What is folklore? This disarmingly simple question has never elicited a simple answer, and throughout centuries of interest in the vernacular, the popular, and the traditional, the definitions of it as both an object of study and a framework for examination have remained of critical importance without ever being wholly solidified. The stakes inherent in this question were apparent to the early nineteenth-century British antiquarians inspired by Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm’s work on German traditional lore, and it remained a central issue for the men and women who founded the Folklore Society in 1878 and attempted over the following decades to solidify the scientific credentials of their study in the face of increasing discursive and methodological synchronicity with the Anthropological Institute. For modern folklorists the question remains, touching research horizons which have expanded beyond the nineteenth-century boundaries of traditional oral lore to include the vast and ever-growing corpus of tale and ritual generated in twentieth- and twenty-first century culture. Both a discipline and a body of evidence, the conceptual, ideological, and political boundaries of the deceptively compact concept of folklore have shifted enormously over the past two hundred years and have rarely remained entirely stable. 1 George Laurence Gomme, Folklore as an Historical Science (London: Methuen, 1908), 3-4. 1 Folklore, though not always under that name, has been an object of inquiry since the early modern period, and the antiquarians who championed the newly rediscovered vernacular hunted out “popular antiquities” – customs, traditions, ballads, and legends – and printed them in their heterogenous collectanea alongside engravings of ruined castles, passages of poetry, and genealogical tables. Amateur and antiquarian interest in vernacular and popular culture began to develop into scholarly pursuit by the end of the eighteenth century, and Henry Bourne, John Brand, and Thomas Percy published semiprofessional collections of popular antiquities that were indeed popular, particularly with the emerging community of scholars interested in the vernacular history of Britain.2 Thus at the beginning of the nineteenth century, interest in folklore was often couched within an antiquarian interest in architectural ruins, medieval literature, and art, all of which continued to be collated and published in collections of regional curiosities and “relics” of the past; much like the eighteenth-century collectanea, these volumes were less interested in the analysis of their material than in the production of an archive of curiosities evocative of an ancient, often idealized, era. In the mid-nineteenth century, however, interest in traditional culture and narrative underwent a definite shift, and the potential of this material to respond to systematic and scientific treatment became of paramount interest. When William John Thoms, under the pseudonym Ambrose Merton, coined the term folklore in the pages of Athaneum in 1846, his intention was to replace 2 Henry Bourne, Antiquitates Vulgares; Or, The Antiquities of the Common People, Giving an Account of Several of Their Opinions and Ceremonies, with Proper Reflections Upon Each of Them; Shewing Which May Be Retain'd, and Which Ought to Be Laid Aside (Newcastle: Printed by J. White for the author, 1725); John Brand and Henry Bourne, Observations on Popular Antiquities: Including the Whole of Mr. Bourne's Antiquitates Vulgares, with Addenda to Every Chapter of That Work: As Also an Appendix Containing Such Articles on the Subject, As Have Been Omitted by That Author (Newcastle upon Tyne: J. Johnson, 1777); John Brand and Henry Ellis, Observations on Popular Antiquities: Chiefly Illustrating the Origin of Our Vulgar Customs, Ceremonies, and Superstitions. Arranged and Revised, with Additions, by Henry Ellis, F.R.S, 2 vols (London: F. C. and J. Rivington, 1813); and Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English poetry : Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, and other Pieces of our Earlier Poets, (Chiefly of the Lyric Kind.) Together with Some few of Later Date, 3 vols (London: J. Dodsley, 1765). See also David Matthews, “Scholarship and Popular Culture in the Nineteenth Century,” in A Companion to Arthurian Literature, ed. Helen Fulton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009): 355-367 and Matthews, The Making of Middle English, 1765-1910, vol. 18, Medieval Cultures (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 2 the unwieldy older terminology – “Popular Antiquities, or Popular Literature” – with an English name that could equal the German Volksmärchen, and perhaps therefore signal the birth of an English tradition of scholarship equal to that of Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm’s hugely influential studies on German popular tradition.3 Hence “folk-lore”, a “good Saxon compound,” which inscribed a national boundary around this newly reconstituted body of material and gestured towards Thoms’ ambitions for the future of the study.4 Roughly thirty years later, when the Folklore Society of London was founded in 1878, Thoms’ national but still largely antiquarian vision for the Society was further modified to harmonize with emergent discourses on human and social origins; primarily through the efforts of Laurence Gomme, the Society was successfully reconstituted as a scientific and increasingly anthropological enterprise, one cast in the mould first formally articulated in Sir Edward Burnett Tylor’s seminal Primitive Culture (1871).5 Primitive Culture is known to modern scholarship as the text from which the discipline of anthropology emerged; in it Tylor first advanced the cause of the comparative method – a geologically informed paradigm for the study of human culture that imagined the ephemera of human society as relics, or “survivals,” to use Tylor’s term, suspended in the layers of time. In the comparative method, materials from across temporal and 3 Wilhelm (1786-1859) and Jacob Grimm (1785-1863) were German scholars known primarily for their critical collections of German traditional tales and, in the case of Jacob Grimm, for work on the history of language development and the discovery of “Grimm’s Law,” which described word change over time. See especially Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Berlin: Realschulbuchh, 1812), Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik (Göttingen: Bei Dieterich, 1819), and Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsche Sagen (Berlin: Nicolaischen Buchhandlung, 1816-1819), 2 vols. For an introduction to German folklore studies and its influence on Britain see Archer Taylor, “Characteristics of German Folklore Studies,” The Journal of American Folklore 74 (1961): 293-301. 4 William John Thoms, “Folk-Lore,” Athenaeum 982 (1846): 862-863. 5 Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom (London: J. Murray, 1871). Edward Burnett Tylor was not only a founding member of the Folklore Society, but served as vice-president from 1880 till his death in 1917. 3 geographic spans could be collated and used to construct a cohesive and universal picture of human society and its development.6 This approach to the study of human culture depended on the intellectual framework of uniformitarianism, the revolutionary theoretical dictum formalized by Charles Lyell in his Principles of Geology (1830-33), a text that forms a discursive watershed in the history of science generally and was particularly critical to the formation of the human sciences.7 The principle of uniformitarianism dictated that causes operative in the modern world can be assumed to have been operative throughout history and vice versa; the development of geological formations, therefore, could be diagnosed with references to contemporary climatic and geological conditions. When translated to the sphere of human history and activity, this principle was redeployed to allow for the comparison of widely disparate cultural ephemera under the assumption that all human development proceeded along the same immutable lines, and that material could be used therefore to reconstruct a linear history of the universal development of culture. Within the discursive boundaries of the Folklore Society, this principle was further distilled to focus its attention on the delineation of the history of British and European culture, and material gathered across the globe provided a means by which the full significance of the archaic fancies of the folk could be supplemented and expanded: Dealing with thought in its primitive forms, it [folklore] traces it downwards from the higher civilizations where it is exhibited in the conscious logic and historical religions, institutions, arts, science, and 6 For further reading on Tylor see George Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (London: Macmillan, 1987), Stocking, “Animism in Theory and Practice: E. B. Tylor’s Unpublished ‘Notes on ‘Spiritualism,’” Man New Series 6 (1971): 88-104, Alan Barnard, History and Theory in Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), and Margaret Hodgen, The Doctrine of Survivals: The History

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